Once & Future (Once & Future #1)(7)

Merlin had gotten used to having a sense of the soon-to-be, even if he couldn’t fill in the details. It kept him one step ahead of the story, always able to help Arthur. In the end, though, it came back to stab him in the eye. Because eventually Merlin saw the end of the story and could do nothing to stop it.

Merlin ran his fingers over the surface of the portal. He had no idea where it would send him, and that was the first new thing he could remember in ages. The next breath he pulled in shivered with possibilities.

If Merlin couldn’t see anything about this cycle, did that mean the ending was unwritten?

What if this Arthur finally united mankind, and brought the cycle to a close, ending the story as triumphantly as Arthur 12 had killed that giant with three eyes, or Arthur 40 had stopped the cyborg uprising?

Then—maybe—Merlin would be free.

Stranger things had happened.

Merlin cleared his throat and hummed a special set of notes. He would have to track Excalibur the old-fashioned way: using his magic to call out, waiting for Excalibur to respond, then going to fetch the sword and the young boy carrying it.

The sword hummed back, and Merlin smiled. “This time is different,” he whispered to himself. “This time is ours.”

With a purposeful wave, he drew the darkness like a curtain. Testing the ground with his slipper, he stepped out, inside the circle of a stone wall, facing a downed oak tree that had the same quality as a freshly robbed grave. Excalibur was gone. Arthur 42 had taken the sword. Morgana had fled, most likely while he’d been eating that sandwich. Typical.

Merlin stood on a ruined planet, under a tetchy gray sky. As he turned in a slow circle, the tang of smoke filled his mouth. He remembered the earlier glories of this place, a time when everything was green, and a young Arthur—the first Arthur—climbed trees and learned the names of plants, becoming a squirrel with a little help from Merlin’s magic. It had been the happiest time in Merlin’s absurdly long life.

Fire tore through those memories as a spaceship shot away from the ground, rising through the atmosphere in a hurry. Merlin hummed so frantically it felt like a bee had gotten trapped in his mouth. A few moments later, the sword hummed back, confirming what Merlin feared. Excalibur was in that spaceship.

Headed away from Earth.

Stranger things had not happened.





When the hum of the sword and the roar of the spaceship had faded, Merlin heard something else. What could only be mechanical destruction.

A machine rolled in, looming above the stone wall as large as a building. He searched for windows in its face. A control room, perhaps. There were no humans to be seen. They had disappeared from the landscape, leaving behind machines programmed to devour mindlessly.

As if on cue, the mechanical jaws opened wide and bit down on the stone wall. Merlin wondered if it would crumble, but instead it disappeared, swallowed by the beast.

He ducked as the machine took out another bite and another. Next, its armlike protrusions aimed thin cannons and rapidly fired into the graveyard.

Bullets!

Merlin thought he would catch one in the chest or the shoulder, and braced for impact. But the bullets lodged in the trees around him, and each went down with a splitting crack.

“Interesting,” Merlin said. The only bullets he’d ever seen killed creatures of the breathing, fleshy type. Was this some kind of fast-acting poison released on impact? A vibration that interfered with the tree on a molecular level?

What would it do to a few-thousand-year-old magician?

As if ready to find the answer to that question, the machine fired at him. Merlin hummed a frantic bit of magic. He split his hands apart and the bullet that was headed for his face broke into a hundred shards, which all flew wide. To prove that he still could, he wove his fingers back together and the bullet reformed behind him, hitting another trunk with a righteous thump. He neatly sidestepped the falling tree. It landed with a crash.

“I don’t have time to be shot at right now,” Merlin said to the machine. “Now would you please point me toward the nearest spaceship? I need to get off this, as they said in the last age I lived through, hot mess of a planet.”

The machine had no answer, and he wasted no time slipping through the hole in the stone wall, and searching the skies for the remains of that spaceship. If only he could chase after it. His brain flicked through the steps of the cycle in a panicking rhythm.

Find Arthur

Train Arthur

Nudge Arthur onto the nearest throne

Defeat the greatest evil in the world

Unite all of mankind

It was one thing to be stuck on that last bit, but he had never had trouble getting past the first step. Usually Arthur was more or less waiting for him when he stepped out of the crystal cave. It looked like this new Arthur would be a different sort of fellow, harder to pin down. A gust of irritation moved through him. Could he make a spaceship? That’d take too much magic and far too much time. If only he didn’t need one. If only he could…

“Fly,” Merlin muttered. “I can fly.”

It felt like the sort of thing a person should remember, but to be fair, he hadn’t flown in centuries. Medieval societies would have pestered him with witchcraft charges and modern ones would have simply shot him out of the sky. But ages ago he’d loved taking off like a roman candle. He had never left Earth’s atmosphere, but if he had the chance to end the cycle, it was worth any risk.